A youth sports blog written by Bob Cook. He's contributed to NBCSports.com, or MSNBC.com, if you prefer. He’s delivered sports commentaries for All Things Considered. For three years he wrote the weekly “Kick Out the Sports!” column for Flak Magazine.
Most importantly for this blog, Bob is a father of four who is in the throes of being a sports parent, a youth coach and a youth sports economy stimulator in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago. He reserves the right to change names to protect the innocent and the extremely, extremely guilty.
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Cody Paul: All Grown Up, and No Major College Football Place to Go

Whatever happened to youth football YouTube sensation Cody Paul? The answer should make you think twice before you post that video titled with your child’s name, followed by BEST [insert sport or skill at certain sport here] EVER!

ESPN: The Magazine is publishing a piece on Paul in, what may or may not be a joke, its annual “Next” issue, where it hypes young athletes who might someday be gracing the screens of all ESPN channels someday. At this point, Paul, the original youth sports YouTube superstar, is not standing out as having a good chance to be among them. Writes Tim Keown:

In 2006, Paul was a 12-year-old running back for the Los Alamitos [Calif.] Pop Warner Pee Wee Griffins. Tiny, strong and fast, he was good in a way that makes everyone else look bad. Physically mature for his age, he made the gangly, prepubescent competition appear to be playing under the influence of psychedelics. Paul scored three or four touchdowns a game and displayed the kind of body control that had him walking on his hands as a 4-year-old.

That year, he scored four touchdowns in the Pop Warner national championship game and asked his older brother to make a video to post online for relatives in Utah. Jon Paul laced together a slick, professional set of highlights and backed it with age-inappropriate music (“Make It Rain” by Fat Joe). He posted the clip on MySpace through YouTube, which these days sounds a little like turning a hand crank to start a car. It was 4 minutes and 3 seconds of kind of cool … kind of strange — a little boy running around without a care in the world to the strains of a man rapping about throwing money at hos. Within a week, Cody Paul received a message from MySpace announcing that his highlights were that day’s featured video. “Next thing you know, it became this monster,” his stepfather says.

Paul became a meme, a character in online scripture. Soon the video had a million hits, then two, then three and now nearly nine. Meme-mapping would show a line starting in Southern California and reaching Utah followed by nine million tentacles covering the globe. Soon Paul would reside in the Internet pantheon with Dramatic Chipmunk, Chocolate Rain and Charlie Bit My Finger.

The original video, at close to 9 million views as I type this.

Unlike Michael Christenson, Cody Paul and his family can’t be blamed for being so unsavvy that they had no idea a video posted to YouTube could become a sensation, nor for being so savvy that they knew YouTube would be the route to instant stardom. Like the YouTube sensations listed by Keown, Paul was a YouTube sensation that defined the term before it existed, inspiring, like Chocolate Rain, numerous video remixes (such as this one casting Cody Paul as a USC running back in the video game NCAA Football 2007). Cody Paul is why there are seemingly zillions of pint-sized athletes juking all over video sites, many of them with the title “Better Than Cody Paul.”

A few years ago, I was curious what happened to Cody Paul, and I went in vain searching for more highlight videos, or any signs of his existence. I had found what appeared to be an old MySpace page that listed his height at 5-foot-5, but I wasn’t sure that could be the real Cody Paul.

As it turns out, it was. More from Keown:

Life inside the box calls for Paul to play college football at a big-time school, win a Heisman and move on to the NFL. Inside the box, Paul is forever 12, forever untouchable, forever a projection of the viewer’s imagination. Life outside the box is different. Paul was a precocious talent, but his precocity came with a catch: He didn’t grow. His height held at 5’5″, so he compensated by hitting the weight room. After a junior year in which he ran for almost 700 yards playing spot duty, he became a member of the Los Alamitos 1,200-Pound Club, an honor reserved for those who can bench press, dead lift, squat and clean that much weight.

He built his body up to around 170 pounds, and today he benches 310. Wide shoulders, strong legs — he looks like an NFL running back viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. He ran for nearly 1,300 yards his senior season and was his league’s offensive player of the year. He loves football.

But the projections haven’t come true. Washington never called. Oregon sent a letter but failed to follow up. USC, despite the coaches raving about Paul’s video at camp, didn’t express any interest after that. There are indeed two lives — one in the box and the one in which Paul lives — and he knows they don’t bleed into each other. The guy in the box was him but not him. Paul accepts the reality: a few inches too short and a few pounds too light for the big time. “Not much I can do about that,” he says, palms up.

Paul actually ran for nearly 1,300 yards his senior season and was his league’s player of the year, so it’s not like the football ability disappeared. And you’d think with the success of short backs such as the New Orleans Saints’ Darren Sproles, Paul would get looks from more than Bryant College, a Football Bowl Subdivision (lower Division I) program, or Robert Morris in Chicago, a startup NAIA football program. If college recruiters would like to take a look, Paul has, of course, had a YouTube video of his highlights created for their convenience.

Keown writes that Paul as a cautionary tale “has a fundamental problem: It isn’t true. These projections that tail him? They’ve never been his. Instead, they are the disembodied, external predictions based on the giddiness of discovery. Paul’s been too savvy to fall for that.”

True as that may be, Paul IS a cautionary tale — perhaps not to himself, but to other kids and parents trying to trade on early youth sports success, especially through a YouTube highlight video. Just because your kid dominates at 12 doesn’t mean he or she will dominate at 17. Just because your kid is bigger than his or her peers (or of equal size) doesn’t mean the other kids won’t be bigger at 17. And calling attention to your child in this way can build up expectations and cause a backlash (Keown writes that opponents have said to Paul, “Not today, YouTube”) that the child may not be able to handle.

Or the cautionary tale could be this, to dream-chasing children and parents: there will never be another Cody Paul when it comes to youth sports YouTube sensations. There are too many would-be Cody Pauls to sift through (including one identified as “Joey Chenoweth #2 — Cody Paul cousin). And, the big-time programs have gotten wise to all the highlight reels.

As it turns out, the irony of Cody Paul’s situation is that if he does make it big in football, he’s going to be an under-the-radar success.

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